Thursday, May 7, 2009

Busy Times & Good News

The past six weeks have been a blur of activity. I made a presentation to 7th graders at the Salem Academy Charter School in Salem, MA. This group was considerably younger than all of the others that I've worked with, but they hung in there. The first String-A-Thon at our local pub, Harlow's, was a huge success and will be repeated on Tuesday, May 12. Eleven people showed up to string bottle caps and drink beer. They managed to string 114 lines! Two weeks ago I did two presentations at New England College in Henniker, NH and the Art Club kept all of my equipment for the week so that they could drill bottle caps and string them. Their efforts culminated at NEC's Earth Day Festival. St. Paul's School had an Earth Day Festival as well and thanks to inclement weather, more students showed up to my presentation and managed to string almost 200 lines. I made a presentation about raising water awareness in NH schools at a Department of Environmental Services' Drinking Water Source Protection Workshop last Friday. I was given a display table where I had a bowl of bottle caps and many participants stopped to ask what they were all about. It was fun to talk to water professionals and environmentalists about the project, which certainly was unique at this extremely technical workshop. My friend, Randi, came up from Boston for the weekend to help me hang all of the strings that had been piling up. We made a major dent in the pile and as a result, the installation is coming together beautifully. Yesterday I received a grant award from the Anne Slade Frey Charitable Trust of Hanover, NH, for which I am very grateful.